WGN to air more sports after dropping CW

WGN-TV/Channel 9, the Chicago TV station owned and operated by Tribune Media, will drop its affiliation with CW Network and be able to deliver about 30 more professional sports games annually.

WGN will end its CW tie on Sept. 1, Tribune Broadcasting, a unit of Chicago-based Tribune Media, said in a statement. As an independent station, it will also expand weekend morning news and syndicated programming as it takes control of all the advertising revenue, as opposed to sharing it with CW. An important aspect of the deal is that WGN will no longer be forced to move games to other stations to accommodate CW programming, Larry Wert, president of broadcast media for Tribune Broadcasting, said in the statement.

WGN has had the rights to broadcast about 150 Chicago Cubs and White Sox baseball games, Bulls basketball games and Blackhawks hockey games annually, but in the past, it had to shift about 30 of them because of CW prime-time commitments. Now, WGN will be able to broadcast all of the games, which include some during the preseason.

Tribune Broadcasting and Burbank, Calif.-based CW Network also announced that they had reached a new long-term agreement to continue airing CW programming on 12 of Tribune Media's other TV stations across the U.S., including WPIX-TV in New York and KTLA-TV in Los Angeles. That agreement covers about 28 million households, or 25 percent of the country, the companies said in a joint release.

The CW Network affiliation in Chicago will transfer to WPWR-TV/Channel 50, which is a 21st Century Fox duopoly station with Chicago's WFLD-TV/Channel 32. As part of such arrangements, broadcasters pay networks for use of the programming, so Tribune Broadcasting likely also lowered its cost by removing one station from the pact.